Archive for September, 2006
A Disservice to the Poor
There’s much ado at the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the federally funded organization intended to provide legal assistance to the poor.
Last month, the AP catalogued a pattern of excessive spending at the LSC. Then, as I indicated in my National Review Online article, the LSC Board contemplated firing the employee who had unearthed much of the extravagance. This employee, LSC Inspector General Kirt West, has also found other questionable practices at the LSC and begun an investigation of the Board itself.
Earlier this week, at a congressional hearing, the chairman of the LSC Board denied that board members had considered dismissing West. This was shocking given strong evidence to the contrary — namely, meeting transcripts from January in which the board’s vice-chair said of West, “[H]e’s got to shape up or we will ship him out.” At the same meeting, another board member said flatly, “He doesn’t belong as the Inspector General of this organization.”
This is yet another sorry chapter in the history of the LSC. For over 20 years, this organization has continued to misuse taxpayer dollars to advocate political causes. Is it time to pick up the mantle of Ronald Reagan and finally abolish the LSC?
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Defending the Constitution
Republican Sen. Arlen Specter expects the Supreme Court to invalidate a law that he voted for:
Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) voted for the bill after telling reporters earlier that he would oppose it because it is “patently unconstitutional on its face.” He cited its denial of the habeas corpus right to military detainees. In an interview last night, Specter said he decided to back the bill because it has several good items, “and the court will clean it up” by striking the habeas corpus provisions.
Don’t be surprised if one or two Supreme Court justices respond with something like this: “This is a grave matter and judges are ill-suited to make national security decisions and so I think it proper to defer to the considered judgment of elected representatives of the people in the Congress on this habeas corpus matter.”
As I point out in this paper, too many people seem to think that the Constitution will somehow automatically check the government when it goes too far. Not so. The Constitution cannot enforce itself. This latest episode in anti-terrorism legislation shows that we have not broken out of a vicious political cycle and that’s a very bad indication of the political and legal trends in America.
Republican Congressman Demands Answers!
Via Doug Bandow, here’s an illustration of the depth of analysis we’ve come to expect from our Congress on foreign policy issues:
Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.
—Trent Lott
Let’s not wonder why we’re in such a mess overseas. This tells you all you need to know. God help us.
America’s “Help Wanted” Signs
While the U.S. House and Senate compete with each other to see who can authorize the longest wall along our border with Mexico, evidence continues to grow that the U.S. economy could use more foreign-born workers. Here are three examples from just the past few days:
The Washington Post reported this morning, in an article headlined, “Visas for skilled workers still frozen,” that the number of H1-B visas available each year remains capped at a number far below the ongoing needs of U.S. employers. As the article explains: “[M]any of the country’s largest technology companies and most prestigious research laboratories have said they are unable to find enough U.S.-born scientists and similar workers to fill their openings. … But only 65,000 H-1B visas are issued each year, and demand has been so high recently that all of them are taken instantaneously.”
Earlier in the week, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard Fisher, noted in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, that the U.S. economy has reached full employment and is beginning to feel the pinch of labor shortages in certain sectors. As Fisher told his audience:
I am hearing more and more reports about the difficulty of finding labor to work our oil fields or run our chemical plants. Bankers complain of a paucity of bank clerks and tellers. Truckers are experiencing a shortage of drivers. In Houston, we are hearing complaints about the difficulty of finding cashiers for retail establishments. A major hotelier told me last week that there is a shortage of housekeeping staff. … companies are now voicing the kinds of complaints about labor shortages most often heard in a full employment economy.
Adding to the evidence, a major report released Wednesday on the need to modernize America’s agricultural policies included a recommendation that Congress enact comprehensive immigration reform. The report, by a task force appointed by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, noted, “Immigrants today play a vital role in nearly every aspect of our agricultural and food processing system, often taking jobs that are low-paying or shunned by native-born workers.” The report cited Hmong poultry producers in the Ozarks and Hispanic workers in the meat processing plants in the Midwest, calling such workers “vital to the [agricultural] sector’s competitiveness.”
As members of Congress seek to reform U.S. immigration law, they should keep in mind that our nation’s economy is made stronger and more dynamic when peaceful, hard-working people are allowed to come here legally to fill jobs that not enough Americans are willing or able to fill.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Trade and Immigration
Why Is a Good Teacher Like a Needle in a Haystack?
If you have children, they’re likely settling into their school-year routine at this point. But how much are they actually learning? The answer to that question depends heavily on your child’s teacher.
With so much riding on teacher selection, surely school administrators go out of their way to hire the best, right? Not so, I discovered! My new policy analysis, Giving Kids the Chaff: How to Find and Keep the Teachers We Need, reports that administrators seem to hire mediocre candidates even when standouts are waiting in the wings.
While many of the qualities of good teachers are difficult or impossible to measure – charisma and dedication comes to mind – studies reliably show that a teacher’s own academic aptitude and a strong math or science background can make a difference in his effectiveness. Nonetheless, aspiring teachers with top test scores are actually slightly less likely to be hired than their average counterparts. More surprising still, education majors are inexplicably hired more frequently than math and science majors despite a recognized shortage of highly-skilled teachers in those fields.
School choice reforms could put an end to the madness by creating incentives for principles to hire teachers who will satisfy parents. Finally: a way to separate wheat from chaff in the teaching profession.
New Jersey LOVES Education Tax Credits
A recent poll conducted by Monmouth University’s Polling Institute on behalf of Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), showed that an overwhelming 74 percent of New Jersey residents support targeted education tax credits.
The support for tax credits is tremendous – you can’t find 74 percent support for apple pie – but it’s not all that surprising. Education tax credits consistently outpoll vouchers and have been the most successful school choice legislation in recent years. This new “blue” state poll adds to the mountain of evidence that people want school choice, and that education tax credits are the most promising way to get it.
The poll also found a solid majority, 54 percent, supports vouchers, although this is a significant drop from the 66 percent support found in a 2002 poll. Only 38 percent oppose vouchers. The level of support for vouchers is the same as it is for another popular reform, student-based funding, which determines funding for each student according to their need and allows that money to follow them. 54 percent of respondents support the proposal and 32 percent are opposed.
Maybe one more poll showing how big support for school choice really is will be enough to get politicians to stand up to the teachers’ unions . . . ok, maybe not.
Habeas Corpus
Today’s Washington Post has this to say about the detainee bill that is working its way through the Congress:
Some of the fiercest debates focused on whether foreign terrorism suspects should have access to U.S. courts for challenging the legality of their detention, a right known as habeas corpus.
House Republicans blocked Democrats from offering amendments, including one that would have extended the habeas corpus right to detainees.
Cato Institute adjunct scholar Richard Epstein, criticized the proposals to curtail habeas corpus in this statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee a few days ago.
For additional background on the writ of habeas corpus, read this and this.
Costs vs. Spending
In yesterday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt writes:
Mr. Wagoner’s argument has become the accepted wisdom about the [health care] crisis: the solution lies in restraining costs. Yet it’s wrong.
In fact, the solution does lie in restraining costs. Leonhardt is wrong because he conflates costs and spending.
Spending is the amount of money we devote to medical care. Costs are different. The money devoted to medical care represents a cost, because we give up the next-highest value use of that money (e.g., a skiing trip). But we also bear costs due to illness, including pain, limited mobility, and shortened lifespans. We spend money on medical care to reduce the total costs that we bear. Spending a lot of money on medical care is therefore desirable — so long as the benefits (reduced pain, enhanced mobility, longer lifespan) exceed the costs for each increment of spending. The solution to every economic problem undeniably lies in restraining costs.
Leonhardt probably meant to shoot down the idea that the solution to America’s health care crisis is in restraining spending. Indeed the thesis of his article seems to be that even though there are many wasteful medical expenditures, a lot of what America spends on health care is very worthwhile. But he repeatedly confuses the two concepts:
But the No. 1 cause of the cost increases is still the one you can see at the hospital and in your medicine cabinet — defibrillators, chemotherapy, cholesterol drugs, neonatal care and other treatments that are both expensive and effective.
But if those treatments are expensive and cost-effective, then they would reduce costs.
The confusion keeps Leonhardt from reaching the $64,000 question: How can we eliminate waste while preserving what works? Or to put it another way, How can we reduce spending without increasing costs?
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Baltimore Sun: Deep-Six REAL ID
The Baltimore Sun opinion page recognizes that the REAL ID Act’s national ID system “will neither weed out terrorists nor make a dent in the flow of illegal immigration – the two problems it was devised to address.” In light of the exorbitant cost and impossibility to implement, its advice is to junk the REAL ID Act.
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Feariness about Data Loss
In the spirit of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” here’s another useful term for the pop lexicon:
fear i ness (fir’ e-nes) n. The quality of being feared, even though logic and/or evidence indicates there is little to fear.
A prime example of feariness right now is data loss — the loss of control over confidential information that could lead to violation of a person’s privacy, identity theft, and fraud. This feariness has been fanned by the recent thefts of government and corporate computer hardware containing important data files.
Though privacy violations and fraud are worrisome, an article in today’s New York Times explains that much of the alarm over data loss is just feariness:
The veterans’ laptop episode underscores the crucial distinction between data loss and malicious data theft — a distinction that has often been glossed over or ignored in the recent wave of alarming disclosures of data breaches at government agencies, universities, companies and hospitals. In most cases, the consequences — financial and otherwise — of the data losses have been slight.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Regulatory Studies; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Cato Unbound: Dealing with the Terrorist Threat
I hope you’ve been following the conversation this month at Cato Unbound on “9/11 Five Years After: Reassessing the Terrorist Threat and Homeland Security.” It has heated up over the past couple days with great new posts from John Mueller, Clark Kent Ervin, Veronique de Rugy, and Timothy Naftali.
Spelling Disaster for Higher Ed
In a speech at the National Press Club yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made the prophecy come true.
In November – not long after Spellings announced the creation of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education – I wrote the following in a National Review Online op-ed:
In September, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the formation of a commission tasked with designing a “national strategy for higher education” to prepare us for the 21st century.
The commission is composed entirely of people in academia, government or big business, all of whom benefit when taxpayer money is shoveled into higher education. Its recommendations are therefore almost a foregone conclusion: The federal government should spend more on student aid supposedly to ensure, as Spellings demands, that we have a workforce for the 21st century, and on “basic” research that businesses want done, but on which they would rather not risk their own money.
Of course, with a unified national strategy two more things will come: federal control of academia and an end to the competition for students that has driven innovation in American higher education and made it the envy of the world.
In her speech yesterday, Spellings confirmed many of my fears from November, calling for more federal student aid, new federal databases populated with information on every student and college in America, and a federally funded program that would bribe schools into making all their students take standardized tests in order, supposedly, to measure their “learning outcomes.” And Spellings opened the door to do even more than that, announcing that she will be holding a “summit” this spring to discuss each and every proposal in the commission’s final report, which includes demands for substantially increased federal research spending, and a blanket charge to create a national “strategy for lifelong learning.”
What Spellings glossed over – as did the commission’s report – was the cause of higher education’s most basic problem, skyrocketing prices. Why? Probably because the federal government is to blame. Federal financial aid enables students to demand ever-more expensive college goodies, fueling, rather than grounding, the college cost rocket. Indeed, as George Leef of the John William Pope Center explains in a new study, it is abundant government aid, as well as politicians’ incessant and specious declarations that almost everyone needs to go to college, that drive almost all of higher education’s major problems. In addition to pushing up prices, government aid and political rhetoric have convinced woefully unprepared students to pursue schooling they can’t handle, fueled rampant “credentialism,” and rendered actual learning in college largely irrelevant.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of Spellings’ efforts to control higher education, however, is that she openly touts federal work in elementary and secondary education as the model for what needs to be done in higher ed.
Maybe I’d better repeat that: She openly touts federal work in elementary and secondary education as the model for what needs to be done in higher education.
Apparently, our stagnant, embarrassing, public K-12 schools, which the federal No Child Left Behind Act has only made worse by encouraging states to lower academic standards and hide failures, have a lot to teach our colleges and universities, which are, if nothing else, hands down the most popular destinations in the world for international students.
Hopefully, it’s not too late for colleges and universities to realize what they’re heading for, and fight federal assaults tooth and nail. Today, we will begin to get an idea whether this will happen, both as reactions to Spellings’ plans hit the media, and at a special forum on overhauling the ivory tower to be held right here at Cato.
The prophecy about Spellings’ proposals has come true, but there’s still hope that those proposals won’t become reality.
Bush, McCain, and Prisoner Policy
Today’s Washington Post has an editorial entitled “Rush to Error.” The editorial says that Congress should not be pushed into approving the Bush-McCain accord with respect to the handling of prisoners. The Post is right.
The legal issues can get pretty complicated, but it may be useful to take a few steps back from the nitty-gritty to gain perspective. Last June, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in a case called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The Court ruled that President Bush’s plan for trials before military tribunals was unlawful and that Common Article III of the Geneva Convention applied to all prisoners in U.S. custody. Thus, as a result of Hamdan, this is the status quo:
1. There will be no trials before special military tribunals.
2. The CIA “program” of secret arrests, secret detentions, and secret interrogation tactics is shut down.
3. There is a chance that there might be a war crimes prosecution someday because the War Crimes Act made it a crime to violate Common Article III of the Geneva Convention.
The Bush administration abhors the status quo and that is why it has been seeking legislation from the Congress in recent weeks. The proposed legislation will do at least three things:
1. It will revive a policy of trying persons before special military tribunals. (The Supreme Court ruling simply said that Bush could not set up the courts on his own authority).
2. It will, in effect, revive the CIA “program” of “alternative interrogation procedures.”
3. It will immunize past actions of government agents from criminal prosecution.
Given all this, the best thing that can happen is for Congress to simply adjourn.
Federal Voucher Advocates Ignore the Risks
Conservative school choice advocates seem almost unanimous in their desire for federal vouchers. Writing in National Review Online, the Fordham Foundation’s Michael Petrilli supports such a program on the grounds that it would save urban Catholic schools from insolvency. I couldn’t agree more that Catholic schools have been an invaluable educational lifeline for many families, and are eminently worth saving. But I am mystified by the right’s apparent lack of concern about the risks of federal school choice programs.
And I’m not just talking about the 10th Amendment’s proscription against federal education policymaking, which Bill Bennett and Rod Paige dismissed last week as “a naïve commitment to states’ rights.” I’m talking primarily about the sobering examples of national voucher programs in countries like the Netherlands and Sweden.
While these programs are superior, in many respects, to education monopolies such as our own, they suggest that federal voucher programs bring with them stifling federal regulation. In Sweden, the regulation was there from the start, while in the Netherlands it built up inexorably over time. There are no examples anywhere in the world of federal governments extending funding to private schools without also extending federal control – whether immediately or gradually. The end result is that independent schools lose their independence, and any hope for the rise of a truly competitive education industry is lost.
Why are conservatives ignoring this risk? Perhaps they no longer see federal regulatory encroachment as a risk at all. Many have specifically advocated increased federal intervention in the content of instruction (see this debate on federal standards between Michael Petrilli and Cato’s own Neal McCluskey, or Neal’s current piece in NRO).
There are alternatives. State level school choice policies are preferable to federal ones, and funding universal school choice with private dollars (through non-refundable tax credits) is preferable to doing it with government dollars. Short version of this argument here. Long version here.
It’s Getting Better All the Time (contd.)
The Washington Post has a 12-inch story on Tuesday with this headline:
Freshman from Arlington
Comes Down With Mumps
Is that news? When I was a kid back in the benighted 60s, everyone got mumps. Why is it news today? Because now we have vaccines, and kids don’t get mumps any more. So it’s actually news when somebody gets “the mumps, a highly contagious viral disease.” Sounds bad when you put it that like that, but it seemed a standard part of growing up a generation ago.
According to this timeline, a vaccine was licensed in 1967, and an improved one in 1971. And since then, I guess, nobody gets mumps. Another reminder of why paying a high percentage of our income for medical care is not exactly a bad thing.
Military Manpower Problem Solved!
Americans who worry that the U.S. military has been stretched to the breaking point to wage the endless war in Iraq and fulfill a vast and growing number of commitments around the world can rest easy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has found a vast new pool of military personnel–in Montenegro. Skeptics might point out that Montenegro has a population of 630,000, and may, therefore, not be much help on the manpower front. But such people are just the chronic defeatists we hear so much about.
Admittedly, it might seem a tad humiliating for the secretary of defense of the world’s sole remaining superpower to go, hat in hand, to a tiny country and ask for military assistance. But when said superpower insists on fighting unnecessary and counterproductive wars, it can’t let pride get in the way of seeking aid. With Iraq and Afghanistan both heating up, though, we need more realistic options than to court mini-states as strategic partners.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security
Tariff Bill Would Punish Millions of American Families
In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription req.), Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threaten to demand a vote on their bill that would drastically raise tariffs on imports from China if the Chinese government does not move quickly to strengthen the value of its currency.
The senators claim that China’s currency, the yuan, is 15 to 40 percent undervalued against the dollar, giving Chinese imports an unfair advantage in the U.S. market and discouraging U.S. exports to China. China revalued its currency by 2.1 percent last summer and it has appreciated another 2 percent since then, but the senators say this is not enough. They blame China’s currency for our large bilateral trade deficit with China and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Their bill would impose a hefty 27.5 percent tariff if China does not sharply revalue its currency within six months after the bill’s passage.
In a Cato Trade Briefing Paper, “Who’s Manipulating Whom?” published in July, I documented the fact that imports from China have not reduced America’s overall manufacturing output. In fact, since China fixed its currency in 1994, real output at U.S. factories has actually increased by 50 percent. The sectors where China is most competitive—lower-end, labor-intensive goods such as shoes, clothing, and toys—have been in decline in the United States for decades. Goods we used to import from other countries anyway are now imported directly from China. U.S. factories employ fewer workers than they did a decade ago not primarily because of imports from China but because remaining workers are so much more productive.
Imposing the steep tariff called for in the senators’ bill would surely hurt workers and producers in China, but it would also victimize millions of American consumers. More than three-quarters of what we imported from China last year were goods Americans use every day in their homes and offices—not only all those shoes, clothing items, and toys, but also sporting goods, bicycles, TVs, radios, stereos, and personal and laptop computers. The Schumer-Graham bill would be a direct, regressive tax on millions of low- and middle-income American families. It would also jeopardize tens of billions of dollars of sales American companies now make in China, our major, growing export market.
Chances are slim that the Schumer-Graham bill will become law anytime soon, but the fact that such a reckless piece of legislation would be considered on the floor of the Senate should be as troubling to Americans as to the Chinese.
Filed under: General; International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Doctors without Borders
I have to join Ezra Klein in copying in its entirety this Dean Baker post to The American Prospect’s blog Tapped:
NPR had a piece this morning on the possibiity that Medicare reimbursements for doctors will be cut. It told listeners that if this cut went into effect, then there may be a shortage of doctors who are willing to serve Medicare beneficiaries.
In other contexts, such as supplies of farm workers, custodians, and restaurant workers, NPR has told listeners that shortages meant that the country needed immigrant workers. No one interviewed for this segment mentioned the possibility of more immigrant doctors, even though doctors receive much higher pay in the United States than they do in the developing world, or even Europe. Surely, if the United States worked to eliminate the barriers that make it difficult for foreigners to train to U.S. standards and practice in the United States, there would be large numbers of foreign physicians who would be willing to do the work that NPR tells us American workers do not want to do.
The great thing about economic models is that you can use the same models for almost anything, you just have to change the words that appear on the axis. If getting immigrants, who will accept low pay, to work in our farms and factories makes economic sense, then getting foreign doctors, who are willing to accept low pay, also makes sense. Maybe NPR will one day get reporters who know economics, if we elimiante [sic] barriers to trade among journalists.
Perhaps a cut in Medicare reimbursements could spark a conversation about liberalizing immigration and licensure restrictions on physicians and allied health professionals.
Filed under: General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Tell Me That’s Not Your Final Answer
The congressionally chartered “Citizens’ Health Care Working Group” today released its final recommendations on how to reform America’s health care sector. (I commented on their interim recommendations here and here.)
As with many GOP-led health care reform efforts, this one began with leftist premises about the role of government. Recommendation #1 is that the federal government should “Establish Public Policy that All Americans Have Affordable Health Care.” Recommendation #2 is that the feds should “Guarantee Financial Protection Against Very High Health Care Costs.” (The group inadvertently neglected to cite any passage from the U.S. Constitution that actually grants Congress the power to do such things.)
Given those premises, there was little doubt that the group would recommend left-wing reforms. For example, the group claims to have developed both a “market–based model” and a “social insurance model” for achieving universal coverage. Yet the former is a mirror image of the statist Massachusetts health plan. What kind of “market-based model” increases taxes and government spending while forcing individuals to purchase government-defined insurance policies? Good grief.
I would give my right eye for a health care reform panel that would make this its charter:
To make health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
To me, that doesn’t just seem simple and non-controversial, it seems to be what everyone involved in health policy wants.
Moreover, a mission like that would force the panel to consider not just the goodness of its intentions, its knowledge of today’s health care sector, or its ability to do math, but also the incentives that its recommendations would create, and their long-term impact.
Let’s hope some enterprising panel-creator is reading this.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy
The Cato Policy Analyst Who (May Have) Saved a Man’s Life
Who is Cory Maye? He’s a Mississippi man sentenced to death in 2004 for shooting a police officer in a botched, forced-entry drug raid on his apartment. The circumstances look very much like self-defense: a man asleep in his home with his 18-month-old daughter reached for a gun when someone kicked down his door late at night. Maye shot three times into the darkness and killed a police officer. Capital murder, or tragic mistake?
If you’ve heard of the Cory Maye case, it’s almost certainly due to the tireless efforts of Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko, who, during the course of researching a Cato policy study on paramilitary drug raids, came across reports of Maye’s conviction, got suspicious, and started digging. If you haven’t heard of the Cory Maye case by now, this will get you started:
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